Tag: monsters

Ostensibly a forgettable creature feature, Scared to Death is noteworthy as an egregious case of W.M.H.S. (White Male Hero Syndrome). That’s when an otherwise bland, unlikable, undeserving character is elevated to hero status just because he’s a White man -- sort of like how Rudy Giuliani became "America's Mayor"...

A year or so after Attack the Block was released, another British sci-fi horror film with a black protagonist fighting an alien invasion came out -- with less spectacular results. Noel Clarke stars in Storage 24 as Londoner Charlie, who’s down in the dumps after his girlfriend Shelley (Antonia...

Pooka! was the third entry in Hulu’s Into the Dark series of holiday-themed horror movies, and nearly 20 editions in, it remains the best IMO. It also features the most identifiable titular character in the franchise, so it’s not surprising that it would be the first to receive the...

2013’s Ghetto Goblin was a cheapie from South Africa whose name change from Blood Tokoloshe reflected a cheesiness inherent in the production, but The Tokoloshe is a much more polished, professional affair that thankfully avoided a name change for American consumption, so we don’t have to deal with watching...

For a while, it seemed that the go-to move for an established film franchise that had reached a shark-jumping level of creative desperation was to shoot it into outer space -- the cinematic equivalent of a family sitcom adding a baby into the mix. James Bond, Hellraiser, Airplane, Leprechaun,...

I will go to my grave saying that The Blob is one of the best horror movies of the 1980s. It combines the throwback alien invasion mayhem of the 1950s with the grisly creature feature effects of the '80s and tosses in some fun, Spielbergian adventure overtones to boot....

It should go without saying that portrayals of black characters in horror movies can stand to improve, but on the bright side, they aren't as bad as they've been in the past. Compare the original King Kong to 2017's Kong: Skull Island, for instance (acknowledging that films like these...

The Night Seekers is one of those movies that’s so spectacularly bad, I'd need to review the script word by word to even come close to conveying its awfulness. It’s so fundamentally flawed, it operates on a different plane of existence. It's hard to even know what to make...

Of the recent glut of “found footage” horror movies...Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes is one of them. It’s far from the best example of this style, but it’s certainly not the worst. What it lacks in scares, it makes up for in sheer competence -- which frankly is more...

"Admirable" probably isn’t the first (or 20th) word you’d think of to describe a movie about killer sand, but The Sand feels like a well-intentioned attempt at a post-racial horror film that bucks genre conventions of pre-determined roles based on looks, race and gender. It's otherwise SyFy-level fare with dated...